To figure out the kinds of interactive entertainment girls would really find
compelling, Laurel launched a major research campaign. "We took a three-pronged
approach," she explains. "We did hundreds - maybe thousands - of interviews
with 7- to 12-year-olds, the group we wanted to target with our products. We
watched play differences between boys and girls. We asked kids how they liked
to play; we gave them props and mocked-up products to fool around with." Laurel
and company consulted experts in the field of children's play:toy store owners,
teachers, scout leaders, coaches. Finally, they looked at all the research
literature they could get their hands on, including material on play theory,
brain-based sex differences, even primate social behavior - all with the goal
of seeing how it might carry over into the realm of interactive
entertainment.

Now, before we move into the Land of Sweeping Generalizations, a disclaimer:
there are girls and women who like to slaughter mutant humanoids as much as any
man does, and whose only discontent with Duke Nukem is that the
bloodbaths it facilitates are simply too tepid; on the other hand, there are
boys and men who don't immediately turn into glassy-eyed alien snuff zombies
when presented with the latest Doom level. That said, Laurel's research
did reveal certain patterns and tendencies.

"Girls enjoy complex social interaction," Laurel says. "Their verbal skills
- and their delight in using them - develop earlier than boys'." Laurel further
found that while girls often feel their own lives are boring, and thus have an
interest in acting out other lives, they like to do so in familiar settings
with characters who behave like people they actually know.

"We also learned that girls are extremely fond of transmedia," Laurel
continues. "Things that make a magical migration from one media to the next. Or
things that can appear in more than one form, like those Transformer toys." As
it turns out, Transformers - the plastic contraptions that lead dual lives as
robots and heavy artillery - offer a vivid example of how girls and boys tend
to approach toys differently: whereas boys are apt to use them as a means of
demonstrating mastery, concentrating on the ability to transform them as
quickly as possible, girls focus on their magical quality, taking delight in
the fact that the toy has a secret.

Laurel may have been one of the first to try to crack the elusive girl's
market, but she wasn't alone. Heidi Dangelmaier, a former doctoral candidate
from Princeton's computer science program, left the school in 1992 to wage an
outspoken campaign to get traditional developers to make titles for girls.
Patricia Flanigan, an entrepreneur who'd previously specialized in children's
furniture, started Her Interactive, the first company devoted exclusively to
developing interactive entertainment for girls. Laura Groppe, a former movie
and music video producer, started Girl Games Inc. Doug Glen at Mattel Media
launched a multimillion-dollar effort to turn the company's successful brands
into digital designs (see "Gender Blender," Wired 4.11, page 190).

These innovators were doing research of their own, and reaching conclusions
that echoed Laurel's. "It all comes down to the nature of value," says
Dangelmaier, who after brief bouts of corporate kick-boxing with Sega and other
traditional developers ended up cofounding a Web development company called
Hi-D. "What's worth spending time on? What's a waste of time? Females want
experiences where they can make emotional and social discoveries they can apply
to their own
lives."